Late last month, I wrote an article and made a video showing off just how well Paladins was working on Linux thanks to Steam Play. Here we are again, only a couple weeks later and it's now a complete dud, with it almost instantly kicking me (and confirmed by others) out of games. You might get in for a few seconds, but with 100% reproduction it will kick you pretty quickly back to the main menu.

Back when previously writing about such an issue, I did make it clear with a note about how "with multiplayer titles and Steam Play there's nothing stopping the developer adjusting their anti-cheat which could end up locking-out Linux gamers".

It's a real shame, as both myself and my Son enjoyed playing Paladins and apart from a few issues which were also present on Windows, it worked beautifully with some really great performance.

While Steam Play has opened the door to a lot of titles not officially available on Linux, it's not quite the answer to everything as some like to repeatedly claim. This is obviously going to be a repeating problem with multiplayer games, so for now, I would honestly just keep away from any game using Easy Anti-Cheat with Steam Play. I will repeat what I said when I spoke about Darwin Project, I think Valve should really note on store pages what anti-cheat systems are used to help gamers make informed decisions.

What will be interesting, is that Valve said they will be rolling out "Steam Trust" in their post about some changes coming to Steam. Perhaps if more developers use Valve's own tools when they're available, this might not be such an issue since you would expect Valve's own tools to work with Steam Play.

I've reached out to Easy Anti-Cheat, again, to see if they would like a constructive chat about it. They didn't reply last time, so hopefully they will this time.

As Code Artisan wrote above EAC can't make the Windows version of EAC work on Wine. It's kernel level code that will never run with Wine. It's up to developers to just run the games natively on Linux, EAC *does* support that (since at least two years ago, think it was even longer now).

Epic had no impact on this. It's always been this way and will be, otherwise EAC will be useless (yes, it's considered useless by some people already, but it's at least doing a better job than VAC and seems like even be seen superior (or at least an increased protection) than BattlEye by the PUBG devs, as it's used instead (or in addition?) to it now).

I know, some people say "better no anti cheat solution than one that blocks of stuff" (though again, as per the first part, if devs just release native versions there's no problem ... it's really up to them and not the third party code they use if the third party code supports the target platforms), and for some games it might actually be *kinda* true. Looking at short based games where you don't have any overall progression, like a shooter: You can avoid cheaters by leaving the game and have lost nothing. Looking at games with progression, especially builder type games (like Terraria type or anything Voxel based like MC, 7DtD etc) you can get *hours* of work destroyed by a single cheater incidence. No protection is no choice here.

And lastly the nice argument of "devs should make their games cheat-safe in the first place": Come on, everyone should know that's total bullshit. I agree that there is some work that can be done, but you will never get a game safe against cheating, not even those that rely on heavily server-authoritative gameplay. Even the biggest players like Blizzard with D2, D3, WoW as examples always had issues with them, which is why they end up with ban waves when they've detected stuff.

Just a few cents from my end. Again, don't blame the EAC guys, they know and do their jobs (and in this case it's not on Epic either, no matter how much you hate them), it's on the game devs.

AllocAs Code Artisan wrote above EAC can't make the Windows version of EAC work on Wine. It's kernel level code that will never run with Wine. It's up to developers to just run the games natively on Linux, EAC *does* support that (since at least two years ago, think it was even longer now).

Of course, because EAC is just a root kit. That's what we call such software in the Linux environment.

AllocIt's always been this way and will be, otherwise EAC will be useless (yes, it's considered useless by some people already, but it's at least doing a better job than VAC

Valve filters Dota2 and CSGO Matches (offline) with an AI (trained beforehand). This is OS-agnostic and comprehensible.

The EAC guys might do a great job. But they do it in a very non-transparent way, that leaves room for much speculation. Plus they install a root kit on your PC.

0aTTValve filters Dota2 and CSGO Matches (offline) with an AI (trained beforehand). This is OS-agnostic and comprehensible.

A) That's not VAC.
B) That requires an accordingly big server infrastructure hosted by the dev/publisher that only the really big parties can afford to run. Even more so when you want to allow people to host their own servers.
C) Even that will never catch everyone. Anti-cheat is always a battle between the "good" and the "bad" guys.

AllocB) That requires an accordingly big server infrastructure hosted by the dev/publisher that only the really big parties can afford to run. Even more so when you want to allow people to host their own servers.

AllocC) Even that will never catch everyone. Anti-cheat is always a battle between the "good" and the "bad" guys.

But with the AI solution, however, the guy with the largest amount of data wins. And how do you want to recognize external cheats that work with image recognition and that don't change anything at all on the PC?

As in fighting cheating? Yes. But that's about it. As stated it's nothing every game can use.

0aTT

AllocB) That requires an accordingly big server infrastructure hosted by the dev/publisher that only the really big parties can afford to run. Even more so when you want to allow people to host their own servers.

QuoteValve had to have spent at least a few million dollars on that hardware: 64 server blades with 54 CPU cores each and 128GB of RAM per blade.

Yeah, nothing every regular dev could do ;)

0aTT

AllocC) Even that will never catch everyone. Anti-cheat is always a battle between the "good" and the "bad" guys.

But with the AI solution, however, the guy with the largest amount of data wins. And how do you want to recognize external cheats that work with image recognition and that don't change anything at all on the PC?

That's only really important for fighting "perfect clicks". As I said especially in long-running games where it's more about building etc you can't cheat without actually interacting with the data. So either on your PC, the host, or in between. Though the in between part can mostly be fought on a network level. The host is typically assumed to be safe (or don't care ... don't play on a server that's set up for cheating if you don't want to), so the remaining part is the client. And that's exactly where solutions like VAC, EAC, BattlEye try to beat the bad guys.

As Code Artisan wrote above EAC can't make the Windows version of EAC work on Wine. It's kernel level code that will never run with Wine.

While I'm sure your theory as to why this is so is very solid, I could have sworn there were people in this very thread saying it used to in fact do so, for them even. So unless EAC changed from not being kernel-level code to being kernel-level code (in which case whoever decided to make that change was also in effect deciding to make it not work in Wine and so people's complaints are not invalidated by your point), there's some sort of contradiction between the theory and some people's lived experience.

If that was really the case (i.e. people could run an EAC protected game on Linux through Wine *AND* connect to an *EAC protected* server - e.g. 7DtD the server owner has the choice not to, so that could just as well be the case) *then* it was basically an EAC bypass that was fixed by them. Which is always a good thing for an anti-cheat solution ;)

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